Legion of Videssos Read online

  “Avshar will care,” he answered; battered as they were, his henchmen flinched. “And I care,” he added. He had made sure to get the knife back from Khuraz and showed it now.

  “It’s a long walk back to our mates,” Bikni whined. “No horses, no food, no arms—and you know what your bloody toy dagger is worth, Varatesh. Not much.”

  “So we walk. I will get home if I have to eat all three of you along the way. And,” Varatesh said very softly, “I will be even.”

  When he strode north, the other three Khamorth, moaning and lurching and grumbling, followed, just as a lodestone will draw dead iron in its wake.

  Prevails, Haravash’s son, came galloping back toward the embassy party from his station at point. “Something up ahead,” the young trooper called.

  “ ‘Something,’ ” Agathias Psoes muttered, rolling his eyes. The underofficer shouted, “Well, what is it?”

  At that point they both dropped into the Videssian-Khamorth lingua franca used at Prista, and Gorgidas lost the thread of their conversation. After days with no more than an occasional herd on the horizon, anything would be a relief, simply to break the boredom of travel. Arigh claimed the Shaum river, the great stream that marked the border between the Khamorth and his own Arshaum, was close. The Greek had no idea how he knew. One piece of the endless steppe was identical to the next.

  “What are they jabbering about?” Goudeles said impatiently. The bureaucrat from the capital could no more follow the bastard frontier dialect than could Gorgidas.

  “Your pardon, sir,” Psoes said, returning to the formal imperial speech. “There’s a nomad encampment in sight, but it doesn’t seem right somehow.”

  “Where are their flocks?” Skylitzes asked. He turned to Prevails. “This place of many tents, where is?” He was at home in the jargon Videssians and nomads used together.

  “You’ll see it as soon as you top the next rise,” the trooper answered, smiling as he switched styles so Goudeles, Arigh, and Gorgidas could understand.

  Skylitzes’ habitual frown deepened. “That close? Then where are their bloody flocks?” He looked this way and that, as if expecting them to pop out of thin air.

  Just as Haravash’s son had said, the encampment was visible when the embassy party rode to the top of the gentle swell of land ahead. Recalling the bright tents of the Yezda he had seen too often in Vaspurakan and western Videssos, Gorgidas was looking for a similar gaudy spectacle. He did not find one. The camp seemed somber and quiet—too quiet, the Greek thought. Even at this distance, he should have been able to see cookfires’ smokes against the sky and horsemen riding from one tent to the next, if as no more than fly-sized specks.

  “A plague?” he wondered aloud, remembering his Thucydides, and Athens wasted at the start of the Peloponnesian War. His scalp prickled. Plagues were beyond any doctor’s power to cure—though who knew what wonders a healer-priest could work?

  Goudeles, who should have known, said, “The expedient course, to my mind, would be to take a broad detour and avoid the risk.” For some obscure reason, it comforted Gorgidas that the Videssian feared disease as much as he.

  “No,” Lankinos Skylitzes said. Goudeles started a protest, but the officer cut through it: “Plague might have killed the plainsmen’s herds, or it might have left them untouched. It would not have made them run away.”

  “You’re right, Empire man,” Arigh said. “Plagues only make people run.” His slanted eyes mocked Goudeles.

  “As you wish, then,” the bureaucrat answered, doing his best to show unconcern. “If the fever melts the marrow inside my bones, at least I know I shall be dying in brave company.” Still an awkward horseman, he urged his mount into a trot and rode past Arigh toward the encampment. Looking less sly and smug than he had a few seconds before, the Arshaum followed, with the rest of the embassy behind them.

  Skylitzes’ logic only partly reassured Gorgidas; what if a pestilence had struck some time before, and the nomads’ animals wandered off in the interim? But when his comrades exclaimed in alarm as three or four ravens and a great black vulture flapped into the sky on spying the oncoming horsemen, the Greek leaned back in his high-cantled saddle in relief. “When did death-birds become a glad sign?” Psoes asked.

  “Now,” Gorgidas replied, “for they mean there is no plague. Scavengers either shun corpses that die of pestilence or, eating of them, fall victim to the same disease.” Unless, of course, the fearful part of his mind whispered, Thucydides had it wrong.

  But as the embassy party came closer, it grew clear no pestilence had brought the camp low—or none save the pestilence of war. Wagons were gutted shells, some tilting drunkenly with one wheel burned away. Tent-frames held only charred remnants of the felts and leathers that had stretched across them. The tatters waved in the wind like a skeleton’s fleshless fingers; death had ruled long here.

  A few more carrion birds rose as the riders entered the murdered encampment—not many, for the best pickings were mostly gone. The stench of death was fading; more bone than rotted flesh leered sightlessly up at the newcomers, as if resenting life’s intrusion into their unmoving world.

  The bodies of men and women, children and beasts lay strewn about the tents. Here was a plainsman with the stub of his blade in his hand, the rest a few feet away. Broken, it was not worth looting. An axe had cleaved the man’s skull. Close by him was what once had been a woman. Her corpse was naked, legs brutally spread wide. Enough flesh clung to her to let Gorgidas see her throat had been slashed.

  With the legions and then in Videssos, the Greek had known more violent death than he liked to remember, but here he saw a thoroughness, a wantonness of destruction for its own sake that had made his flesh crawl. He looked from one of his companions to the next. Goudeles, who knew little of war, was pale and sickened, but he was not alone. Psoes’ soldiers, Skylitzes, even Arigh, who seemed to pride himself for hardness—what they saw shocked them all.

  No one seemed able to speak first, to break the silent spell of horror. At last Gorgidas said, as much to himself as to the rest, “So this is how they wage war, here on the plains.”

  “No!” That was Skylitzes, Agathias Psoes, and three of his troopers all together. Another raven cawed indignantly at the near-shout and waddled away, too stuffed to fly. Psoes, quicker-tongued than Skylitzes, went on, “This is not war, outlander. This is madness.” To that Gorgidas could only dip his head in agreement.

  “Even the Yezda are no worse than this,” the Greek said, and then, his agile mind leaping: “And they, too, came off the steppe—”

  “But it was in Makuran—Yezd, now—they learned to follow Skotos,” Psoes said, and all the Videssians spat in rejection of the dark god. “The plainsfolk are heathen, aye, but fairly clean as heathens go.” Gorgidas had heard otherwise in Videssos, but then Psoes was closer to the Khamorth than men who lived in the Empire proper. He wondered whether that intimacy made the underofficer more reliable or less. The Greek tossed his head. History was proving as maddeningly indefinite as medicine.

  The brief moment of abstraction was shattered when his sharp eyes spied the symbol hacked into the shattered side of a cedar box. He had seen those paired side-by-side three-slash lightning bolts too often in the ruins of Videssian towns and monasteries to fail to recognize Skotos’ mark now. He pointed. Psoes followed his finger, jerked as if stung; he, too, knew what the mark meant. He spat again, sketched Phos’ sun-circle on his breast. Skylitzes, Goudeles, and the Videssian troopers followed suit.

  Arigh and the Khamorth, though, were puzzled, wondering why their companions chose to excite themselves over a rude carving in the midst of far worse destruction.

  “I would not have thought it,” Skylitzes and Psoes said in the same breath. Skylitzes dismounted, squatted beside the profaned chest. The pious officer spat yet a third time, this time directly on the mark of Skotos. Pulling flint and steel from his belt, he cracked them together over a little pile of dead grass. The fire did not want to ca
tch; the grass was still a bit damp from the recent rain.

  “Varatesh’s renegades. It must be,” Psoes said over and over while Skylitzes fumed and his fire did not. The underofficer sounded badly shaken, as if searching for any explanation he could find for the butchery all around him. “Varatesh’s renegades.”

  “Ah.” Skylitzes had coaxed his blaze to life. He put the cedar box at one corner of it. As the flames fed on the tinder, they began licking the wood as well. Skotos’ symbol charred, vanished. “Thus in the end light will cast out darkness forevermore,” Skylitzes said. He and all the Videssians made the sun-sign again.

  As the embassy party left the raped camp behind, Gorgidas wondered aloud, “Where are the nomads learning of Skotos?”

  “A wicked god for wicked men,” Goudeles replied sententiously. To the Greek, that sort of answer was worse than useless. Until this horror, the plainsmen had struck him as men like any others—barbarous, yes, but their natures a mix of good and bad. Nor was Skotos native to the steppe; neither the troopers of Khamorth blood nor Arigh had recognized his mark.

  Yet in Yezd the incoming nomads took to the evil deity with savage enthusiasm—and, on reflection, that was not right either. Before the nomad conquest, Yezd had been Makuran, an imperial rival to Videssos, but a civilized one. And the Makurani had a religion of their own, following their beloved Four Prophets. Whence the cult of Skotos, then, and where the link between distant Yezd and an encampment still all too close?

  Lankinos Skylitzes had no trouble making a connection. “Avshar travels with Varatesh,” he said, as to a stupid child.

  The explanation satisfied him completely, and Gorgidas flushed, angry he had not seen it himself. But the Yezda, the Greek remembered, were already entering Makuran half a century ago. A chill ran up his spine—what, then, did that make Avshar?

  Valash came galloping back toward the horsemen from his station at point. He called something in his own language. The rest of the Khamorth shouted back, glee on their bearded faces. Even dour Rambehisht grudged a smile, though the look he gave Viridovix was unreadable.

  “Camp at last, I’ll be bound, and about time, too. Now we get down to it,” the Gaul said. He had spent four days helping the nomads tend their cattle while Zamasp rode in to fetch herders to replace them. The work was thoroughly dull; cattle were stupid, and the more of them there were together, the stupider the lot of them seemed to get. Even so, he had not been able to enjoy the release mindless tasks sometimes bring, not with his life still held by nomads who were not his friends.

  Yaramna rode close to the Celt. The plainsman was on one of the animals Viridovix had given him. “Good horse,” he said, slapping its neck affectionately. Viridovix understood the second word from a Khamorth obscenity; the plainsman’s action gave him the first.

  “Glad you like him, indeed and I am,” he answered, and Yaramna was as quick to grasp his meaning, if not the sense of each word.

  The Khamorth camp sprawled across the plain, with tents and wagons set down wherever their owners chose. Viridovix guffawed. “Sure and Gaius Philippus’d spit blood, could he see these slovens. Not a proper Roman camp at all, at all. Welladay, free and easy always did suit me better.”

  And yet, his years with the legionaries made him frown when he saw—and smelled—piles of garbage by each tent, when men pissed wherever they happened to be when they felt the urge, as casually as the grazing horses that wandered through the camp. That was no way to make a proper encampment, either. His own Celts were a cleanly folk, if not so much given to order as the Romans.

  The sight of a stranger in the camp, especially one as exotic as the Gaul, made the nomads shout and point. Some shied away, others came crowding in for a closer look. One toddler, bolder than some warriors, ran forward from a cookfire to touch the tip of the stranger’s boot as he rode by. Viridovix, who was fond of children, brought his pony to a careful stop. “Boo!” he said. The tot’s eyes went very round. He turned and fled. Viridovix laughed again; the child’s trousers, otherwise like his elders’, had no seat in them. “Foosh! Isn’t that a sly way to do things, now!” he exclaimed.

  The tot’s mother snatched it up and spanked its bare rump, a use for the bottomless pants the Celt had not thought of. “Puir bairn!” he said, listening to its outraged howls.

  Valash led his comrades and Viridovix to a round, dome-shaped tent larger and more splendid than any of the rest. A wolfskin on a pole in front of it marked it as the clan-chief’s; so did the two sentries eating curded cheese by the entranceway. Beasts and demons in the writhing nomad style were embroidered on the green felt tent; similar scenes were painted on the frame of the wagon that would haul the disassembled tent across the steppe. Rank on rank of baggage carts stood beside it. The chests they carried were shiny with tallow to protect them from the rain.

  All that was wealth only a chief enjoyed, the Gaul saw. Most of the tents were smaller and of thinner stuffs, light enough so one man could pitch them and so a horse could bear their fabric and the sticks that made up their framework along with a goodly part of the rest of a nomad family’s goods. Where the clan leader had dozens of carts by his tent, most of the tribesmen made do with three or four—or sometimes none. Viridovix revised his estimate; the plains life might be free, but it was far from easy.

  One of the sentries licked his horn spoon clean and glanced up at Valash’s group. He pointed at Viridovix, asked something in the Khamorth tongue. They went back and forth for a few seconds. The Celt caught the name “Targitaus” repeated several times; he gathered it belonged to the chief. Then the sentry surprised him by saying in accented Videssian, “You wait. Targitaus, I tell him you here.”

  As the plainsman started to duck inside the tent, Viridovix called after him, “Your honor, is himself after having the Empire’s speech?”

  “Oh, yes. He go Prista many times—trade. Raid once, but long time gone.” The sentry disappeared. Viridovix sighed in relief; at least he would not have explain himself through an interpreter. Trying to use an interpreter for vigorous speech was like trying to yell underwater—noise came through, but not much sense.

  The sentry came out. He spoke to the Khamorth, then to Viridovix: “You go in now. You see Targitaus, you bow, yes?”

  “I will that,” the Celt promised. He dismounted, as did the plainsmen. The second sentry took charge of their horses while the first one held the tent flap open; it faced west, away from the wind. Sensible, Viridovix thought, but the idea of passing a steppe winter in a tent made the red-gold hairs on his arms stand up as if he were a squirrel puffing out its fur against bad weather.

  He dipped his head to pass through the entranceway, which was low even for the stocky Khamorth. When he raised his eyes again he whistled in admiration. The Romans, he discovered, were tyros when it came to tents. This one was big as any four legionary tents, a good dozen paces across. White fabric lined the inside, making in seem larger still by reflecting the light of the fire in the very center and butter-burning lamps all around the edge. Leather bags along the northern side held more of Targitaus’ goods; the men of his household had hung their bows and swords above them. Cooking utensils, spindles, and other women’s tools went along the southern edge of the tent. Between them, opposite the entrance, was a great bed of fleeces and felt-covered cushions. Not an inch of space was wasted, but the tent did not seem cramped.

  That was a small miracle, for it was full of people, men on the northern side, women to the south. There was a low couch—the only bit of real furniture in the tent—between the cookfire and piled-up bedding. Remembering what the sentry had told him, Viridovix bowed to the man reclining on it, surely Targitaus himself.

  “So. You take long enough to notice me,” the nomad chief said to the Gaul; Valash and the rest of the Khamorth had already made their bows. Targitaus’ Videssian was much more fluent than his sentry’s but not as good as Varatesh’s. He did not seem much angered. The Celt studied the man who would decide his fate. Targitau
s was middle-aged and far from handsome—paunchy, scarred, with a big, hooked nose that had been well broken a long time ago and now pointed toward the right corner of his mouth. His full gray beard and the uncut hair under his fur cap gave him something of the look of a gone-to-seed dandelion. But in their nest of wrinkles, his brown eyes were disconcertingly keen. A noble himself in Gaul, Viridovix knew a leader when he saw one.

  “You look like an ’Alugh,” Targitaus remarked; with his guttural accent it took the Gaul a moment to recognize “Haloga.” The Khamorth went on, “Come round the fire so I get a better see at you.” Accompanied by Rambehisht, Yaramna, and the others, Viridovix picked his way through the men’s side of the tent. Nomads sitting on pillows or round cloths leaned aside to let them pass.

  “Big man,” Targitaus said when the Celt stood before him. “Why you so big? You wear out any horse you ride.”

  “Aye, well, so long as it’s not the lassies complaining,” Viridovix murmured. Targitaus blinked, then chuckled. The Gaul smiled to himself; he had gauged his man aright.

  The men on the ground to the right of the chief’s couch translated his words and the Celt’s so the plainsmen could understand. He was the first smooth-faced Khamorth Viridovix had seen; his cheeks were pink and shiny in the firelight. His voice was between tenor and contralto. He wore a robe that his corpulent frame stretched tight.

  Seeing the Celt’s glance, Targitaus said, “This Lipoxais. He is enaree of clan.”

  “ ‘Shaman,’ you would say in Videssian,” Lipoxais added, his command of the imperial speech near perfect. The melting look he gave Viridovix made the Gaul wonder whether the enaree was a eunuch, as he had first thought, or simply effeminate.

  “Shaman, yes,” Targitaus nodded impatiently. “Not to talk of words now.” He measured Viridovix up and down, his eyes flicking to the longsword at the Celt’s hip. “You tell me your story, hey, then we see what words need saying.”